My Life in the Arctic: Tuktoyaktuk and the Ice Road

The Big City of Tuk

Yesterday five of the nurses and my preceptors husband and I took a long road trip up to a community about 200 km north for Inuvik. My preceptor Sharon and her husband Earl have a hummer here and it was a very nice ride up. Apparently the ice road can get pretty bumpy and uneven, expecially where it turns into the ocean, but our ride was very smooth (the first time I can say I was glad to ride in a hummer).

Soura, Sharon, Robyn, Chantale, Alana and me at the turnoff for Aklavik (another small community outside of Inuvik)

The others nurses who went were Alana, Robyn, Soura, and Chantale. This picture is really only about 30 minutes into our two hour drive up.
Tuk, as it is more commonly called here, supposedly has a population of about 850 but anyone from here says it's more like 300-400. It has a grocery store with surprising selection (we spent about 15 minutes just exploring it). You can expect to pay $18.99 for 6 710 mL bottles of pop, or $8.19 for one two L bottle. Awesome.

After we spent some time in the Northern store, we went out to the arctic ocean. It was so cool to be able to look out and just see nothing from ice for as far as you could see. We all took pictures just standing on the ocean. How many people can say they've done that!

After the ocean, we decided to try to get into the community ice freezers, which is a system of underground rooms where people used to and still do sometimes, keep meat. We had called Joanne (of Joanne's taxi-the only taxi in Tuk) the day before but the person who answered the phone said "she's too drunk to come to the phone right now". Apparently she is the one who usually ahs the keys to get into the freezer, but she obviously couldn't help us in her inebriated state. Luckily when we drove by the door was open and there were two men down working in the freezers and they had big garage lights with them! They let us climb the 32 feet down into the freezers and we were able to look around a get a lot of pictures. It was SO cool down there because you could see the layers of permafrost in the walls and the ceiling was covered in these really fine, beautiful ice crystals.

The hole that you have to climb down.

Me and Robyn in the freezer!


The Pingos

After the freezers we really just started to head back to Inuvik. We stopped to look at the Pingos for a bit. Pingos are some sort of weird living organism that bursts up through the permafrost and they grow something like 1/10th of an inch a year or something really insignificant. But obviously over lots of years they get big.

The people who live up here think that the show the Ice Road Truckers in just completely ridiculous because everyone they know drives on the ice road all the time. We had someone at the hospital this week from Tuk and we told her we were going up to see it. She was like " Why would you want to go there? You want to see the Pingos? buy yourself a 33 cent postcard and see them. And those freezers! You'll never get the stink from them out of your clothes. If you're going to go, you better wear something old at least." Just hilarious the difference in views that people who live there have compared to all of us tourists.

On our way home we stopped and took some pictures with the big cracks in the road. Some places the ice had actually created an overriding area on top of itself because it had shifted so much. Earl reassured me that the ice was about 8 feet thick but I was still skeptical. Especially after jokingly putting my foot onto one of the cracks and having it go through! (not to water but it still freaked me out a little bit).